Martin Fleischmann

It has been suggested at various times that I should start an operation in the United Kingdom but – bearing in mind my age and medical history – I think this would be not a very sensible way to go forward.

Now, of course, cold fusion is the daddy of them all in a way, in terms of value, so I think that viewed in a social way, from the point of social considerations and economics, it will tell you that this thing will stay around.

Usually, if you have a new idea, you very rarely break through to anything like recognizable development or implementation of that idea the first time around – it takes two or three goes for the research community to return to the topic.

If you assume that it was a valid experiment, then its disintegration reveals a very substantial part of what has been found since then, including the fact that you can get heat generation at high temperature.

American science is much more organized, much more hierarchical than British science has been.

I don’t know whether you have done your calculations but, about two or three years back, I did a first assessment of what the first successful device would be worth and it came out at about 300 trillion dollars.

You see, I am a very conventional scientist, really.

I don’t suppose I’ll ever retire completely.

I think British science is becoming more like American science – and then there is everybody else, I’m afraid.

The problem is that replacement of Quantum Mechanics by Quantum Field Theory is still very demanding.

It is not necessarily true that expensive experiments are not worthwhile doing but there are plenty of rather cheap experiments which are certainly worth doing.

At the moment I am taking a very careful look at some of the work which we have done in the past.

Now Stan and I were still working in secret at that time but, because of this development, we had to inform the University of Utah because we thought that they might need to take patent protection.

Stan and I funded the first phase of the work ourselves. It was secret.

So if I could just go back now to something which I am sure we should cover here regarding our original scenario: we have, in fact, four ways – four major potential lines of research.

One of my theme songs is that if you can’t do it in a test tube, don’t do it.

It doesn’t matter whether you can or cannot achieve high temperature superconductivity or fuel cells, they will always be on the list because if you could achieve them they would be extremely valuable.

I think you know that I classify science as British science, American science, and everybody else.

Scientists are really very conscious of the fact that they stand on the shoulders of an enormous tree of preceding workers and that their own contribution is not so enormous.

I am a caricature of what British science is about in the way I work.

I have had this view of the optimization of the electrode design for a long time. Historically we went through various phases in the work and eventually worked on large sheets – very large sheets – of palladium.